This week our longtime client Saks Fifth Avenue reopened its designer collections on a newly renovated third floor. In the works for two years, the 50,000 square foot space is home to 49 collections, including 23 designer shops for brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, as well as a section for emerging designers. The floor has been outfitted with custom furnishings and fixtures by artists and designers including Zaha Hadid and Michele Oka Doner. (Take a video tour with Nina Garcia of Marie Claire and “Project Runway.”)

As part of the reinstallation Pentagram created a brand identity for the floor. The 49 names were rendered in Cyrus Highsmith’s Novia and combined to form a number 3. The Saks staff has adapted the font and identity for installations throughout the store.

The famously rudimentary design of craigslist hardly seems to deter users, but Wired asked a pool of designers to give the megasite a makeover for its September issue. The exercise accompanies a cover story about Craig Newmark, the elusive founder and visionary behind the site. For their take on the piece, Lisa Strausfeld and Luke Hayman, working with Takaaki Okada, “decided to do something about the cult of Craig,” says Strausfeld. In the article by Marc Wolf, Newmark is a reticent personality who believes in sharing information; a proponent of grassroots democracy who runs one of the world’s most popular sites exactly as he wants to. Newmark calls himself the “Forrest Gump of the Internet,” and the team responded to this pervasive, peculiar self-effacement by highlighting categories and dates on the site’s homepage to create a ghosted image of Newmark himself. The redesign brings the site back to its origins, as literally Craig’s list.

Since its birth less than five years ago, the rise of Activision’s Guitar Hero franchise has been nothing short of astonishing, vaulting Activision to the position of top US video game publisher with total revenues of $2.9 billion. The Guitar Hero series has sold over 25 million units worldwide, and is widely regarded as a genuine cultural phenomenon.

Today, Guitar Hero releases Guitar Hero 5, setting the stage for the next evolution of Activision’s business growth: the introduction later this fall of Band Hero and DJ Hero. This required the company to reexamine its overall brand identity for the first time. Activision enlisted Pentagram to assist in this effort.

Throughout the past year, we have been refreshing the identity of Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. Pentagram’s relationship with the Cathedral, an extraordinary New York institution, goes back ten years. We designed its previous identity in 1999. Shortly after 9/11, the Cathedral was severely damaged by fire; a painstaking seven-year restoration followed, and the interior was reopened to great acclaim last November. The updated identity, which has been slowly introduced over the past few months, builds on the success of the reopening.